A full day of working in the Google Cloud Platform

Breakfast happened. Espresso shots were made. The movie Alien (2003) is playing with a few directors cut edits on the television. I have to say that today got off to a good start. I’m setup to sit and work for the next few hours without any planned interruptions or disturbances. The entire Alien quadrilogy is queued up to provide something in the background to help keep me focused. That might sound counterintuitive, but I work better with either some music or content on in the background. Sitting down and working in absolute silence is a recipe for my mind to start racing and for my attention to get pulled in a myriad of directions.

Things got real pretty quickly this morning. It just took a few moments to setup a new project called newsletter in my Google cloud Platform (GCP) account. Setting that new project up was probably going to be the easiest part of the whole process. The next little bit of time will be spent working on setting up a natural language processing neural network within my GCP project. My efforts today will be broken down into three areas: 1) setting up the neural network or maybe using the natural language API, 2) building a content ingestion method, and 3) starting work on developing the workflow necessary to ingest content, process that content in a meaningful way, and generate a newsletter based on that content. Writing all of that into one really long sentence made me realize just how much work is on tap today. All of the foundational things are already in place. Today will be able staying focused and putting things together in an ordered and thoughtful way.

Yeah —- I made some progress today, but my ambition outpaced my ability to build all of that in one day. In hindsight, I probably should have known better.